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by dmitrygr 38 days ago
> bullshitter is not the same as the liar, because the liar at least respects the truth enough to try to hide it, but the bullshitter does not care whether what they are saying is true or false

thus, by definition, all LLMs are bullshitters

2 comments

I don't know about that. When you're prompting some LLM, the response you get is a statistically likely valid response to the prompt. Whether it contains any truth or facts or information at all is besides the point; the LLM has done its job of predicting something that is statistically likely to be the answer.

The fact that people assign any weight to that information is the mistake.

> Whether it contains any truth or facts or information at all is besides the point

The definition of bullshit in the original article was precisely this: no care given to whether there is truth in what is said.

Relevant research paper: Hicks, M.T., Humphries, J. & Slater, J. ChatGPT is bullshit. Ethics Inf Technol 26, 38 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5